San Antonio Donors Court a Charter School with a Record of Serving Wealthy White Students

Charter schools have historically been sold as places to try out innovative, low-cost education—a way to give poor kids a chance at a good education outside a failing local school. But some rich folks in San Antonio are trying out another idea.

All this one takes is a cool $50 million from wealthy donors to help a few charter school chains come to town and grow like crazy. The plan is named “Choose to Succeed,” which sounds agreeable enough. It’s a well-manicured proposal, a triumph of branding and public relations-speak, like the charter schools it supports.

Victoria Rico, chair of the San Antonio-based George W. Brackenridge Foundation, is leading this effort. With the money she raises, she imagines building 145 new charter schools with room for 80,000 students in San Antonio. That’s in addition to the charter schools in place today. More than a quarter of the students covered by the San Antonio Independent School District, for instance, are in charter schools already, the ninth-highest charter-school enrollment in the country. (SAISD is just one of 17 San Antonio school districts.)

The foundation’s pitch to donors advertises the opportunity as “for a very limited time” only and appeals to discriminating potential donors with the promise of results. “Billions of philanthropic dollars have disappeared into public school districts with no aggregate impact,” the pitch says, noting the “highly bureaucratic and politicized nature of districts run by elected boards.” Elections! What a drag.

Not to worry, though—Choose to Succeed has the answer. First, donations would help expand KIPP and IDEA, two Texas-based charter school chains that already have campuses in San Antonio. The money would also help lure four out-of-state charter chains with strong national buzz: Rocketship Education, BASIS Schools, Great Hearts Academies and Carpe Diem Schools.

Charter schools, you’ll recall, get public funding based on the number of students they enroll. So these private donations would pay for building construction and other costs of starting a new school. After that, the group says, student education is “sustained completely by public funds.”

At most charter schools, parents usually can’t afford to give a school $1,500 or more a year. Great Hearts is different. Most of its Arizona schools are in wealthier communities with mostly white and Asian students, and do very well on state tests. Great Hearts’ track record is less impressive in more diverse communities.

Great Hearts operates 15 schools in Arizona, built on a “Great Books” curriculum that will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with St. John’s College in New Mexico and Maryland. (Great Hearts Chief Academic Officer Peter Bezanson is a St. John’s grad.) Three of Great Hearts’ campuses are recent additions, but the Arizona Department of Education does have performance and demographic data for 12 of its campuses.

Seven of the Great Hearts schools earned an “A” rating from the state, the highest possible, in the 2011-2012 school year. Three earned “B” ratings and two got “C’s.” But of those dozen schools, only one had any students with limited English proficiency or from low-income families (measured by enrollment in free or reduced lunch programs). In all but one Great Hearts campus, the student body’s racial makeup is at least 70 percent white or Asian. The lone outlier is a school called Teleos Prep, with a vast majority of Hispanic, African American and low-income students, that earned a “C” rating from the state last year.

In Nashville, concerns that the schools foster segregation led school trustees to reject a Great Hearts expansion this year, over the strong objections and threats from state leaders.

It’s not hard to imagine Great Hearts taking a similar tack in San Antonio, fueled by the generous funding from Choose To Succeed. Great Hearts’ application with the Texas State Board of Education requests five school campuses in San Antonio, a city full of opportunities to serve low-income, limited-English and minority students.

The application asks where, specifically, the campuses would be located, and Great Hearts is a little more specific: Alamo Heights and Monte Vista, wealthy enclaves home to just the sort of folks San Antonio’s enthusiastic school reformers are hope to hit up for cash.

Choose to succeed, then, by all means. But you’ll have to pay up first.

Patrick Michels is a reporter for the Texas Observer and a former legislative intern. He has been a staff writer and web editor at the Dallas Observer, and a former editor of the Texas Independent. He has a bachelor's in journalism from Northwestern University, a master's in photojournalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a competitive eating enthusiast.

mpc

Anyone that has kids (or has spent much time with kids) knows that kids are different. Some kids are quiet and some kids are loud. Some like to read books, some hate to read but love math. Some thrive in a large classroom with lots of stimulus, and some get overwhelmed and need more direct attention.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that different schools are better fits for different kids.

The fact that Great hearts schools with a higher percentage of low-income students underperforms schools with fewer low-income students doesn’t prove or disprove anything. Similar performance gaps exist in traditional public schools as well.

But, it is clear that for a lot of families, Great Hearts is a good option for their kids.

It may be true that KIPP’s methods are more effective with their predominantly low-income population. I can imagine that ESL students or students whose parents dropped out of high school might struggle more with a literature-based curriculum than a more general curriculum, but that’s part of choosing what’s best for your kid based on your kid, not based on your zip code.

And all schools recognize the need for additional funding. In San Antonio, from poor districts like SAISD to wealthier districts like alamo Heights, many districts have set up foundations to solicit donations to bridge th gap in school funding.

http://twitter.com/shimerians Shimer Unauthorized

In addition to St. John’s, Great Hearts also pulls a number of its teachers from among the alumni of Shimer College, the Great Books college of Chicago. Shimerfolk who teach there speak well of it.

Given the extremely strong track record of the Great Books method at the college level (in the cases where it has been allowed to be tried), it would be surprising if it didn’t perform fairly well in high school as well; however, as mpc notes, this is likely to depend somewhat on student preparation.

http://www.facebook.com/drjvh Julian Vasquez Heilig

For more on Great Hearts, visit Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig’s blog Cloaking Inequity.

Patrick

Indeed! There’s a link to your blog in this post, as well.

Noalneo-liberalismo

Just look at the board of directors of the fund who is bringing Great Hearts and other charters to San Antonio. All corporatists. The families in San Antonio who are listening to one sided marketing and will see the attrition rates are findings ways to look away as segregation, inequality, and the undermining of Democracy winds it’s way into SA’s education system. This everyone’s kid is different spells out the me and mine mentality that promotes the very principles of privatization and neo-liberalism that makes the inundation of charter schools possible.